Changpeng Zhao.

Before Binance

Changpeng Zhao grew up in rural China. His family moved to Canada after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the Associated Press (AP) reported, and settled in Vancouver. “When I was 15, I was flipping burgers in a McDonald’s,” he recalled in a 2021 interview with the hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci. “I also worked at a gas station after that.” He studied computer science at McGill University in Montreal and then wrote software for financial markets: a system for matching buy and sell orders on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, then futures-trading software at Bloomberg Tradebook. In 2005 he moved to Shanghai and started his own company, Fusion Systems, which built high-speed automated trading systems for brokers.⁠^[1][2][3]

In 2013, over a game of poker in Shanghai, he heard about bitcoin. Bobby Lee, then head of the exchange BTC China, advised him to put 10% of his money into it, NPR reported. Zhao went all in instead, selling his home to buy bitcoin. “My relatives were all like, ‘What?!’” he said. “My mom wanted to spank me on the head, saying, like, ‘You’re stupid, kid.’” Soon he was working in bitcoin as well. He joined Blockchain.info, a bitcoin wallet service, as the third member of its team and spent eight months as its head of development, working alongside the bitcoin promoters Roger Ver and Ben Reeves. He then spent less than a year as chief technology officer of OKCoin, an exchange where people traded ordinary currencies for digital ones.⁠^[2][3]

Binance and bitcoin

All the while, Forbes reported, Zhao was thinking about an exchange of his own that would trade only digital assets and never touch ordinary money, which would keep down the “risks and regulatory complications” Ver had warned him about. He founded Binance in China in June 2017, and the next month raised $15 million by selling its own digital tokens. By February 2018, the magazine said, it had 6 million users and was the world’s largest crypto exchange. The company moved several times, and in 2023 Binance said it had no official headquarters anywhere.⁠^[2][3][4]

Bitcoin was among the assets traded on Binance’s spot markets, where a purchase is settled straight away. By July 2019 Binance also offered bitcoin futures and other derivatives, contracts whose value follows a coin’s price, and let ordinary customers trade with borrowed money. A US court found this in 2023, in a case brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a financial regulator; Zhao consented to its order without admitting or denying the findings. By 2023 Binance had more than 140 million users, NPR reported.⁠^[2][5]

In May 2019 hackers stole more than 7,000 bitcoins from Binance’s hot wallet, the coins it kept online to pay out withdrawals. That was about 2% of the bitcoin it held, TechCrunch reported, and Binance said its Secure Asset Fund for Users would cover the losses. Zhao said the bitcoin community had suggested a rollback: rewriting the most recent blocks of the bitcoin blockchainBlockchainBitcoin's shared record of every payment since 2009, stored in blocks that each link to the one before — which is what makes it a chain. so that the theft never happened. Binance could probably do it within days, he said, “but there are concerns that if we were to do a rollback on the bitcoin network on that scale, it may have some negative consequences in terms of destroying credibility for bitcoin”. Soon afterwards he said Binance would not try.⁠^[6]

On 6 November 2022 Zhao posted that Binance would sell its FTT, a token created by a rival exchange, FTX: “we have decided to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books”. Two days later FTX asked Binance for help with what Zhao called “a significant liquidity crunch”, and Binance signed a non-binding agreement to buy it. The next day Binance pulled out, citing “the latest news reports regarding mishandled customer funds and alleged US agency investigations”. On 11 November FTX filed for bankruptcy.⁠^{[13][14][15][16]}

The US case

On 21 November 2023, in the federal court in Seattle, Zhao pleaded guilty to a single charge, which the court’s judgment names as “Failure to Maintain an Effective Anti-Money Laundering Program”, an offence under the US Bank Secrecy Act. The programme in question was Binance’s: the checks a financial business must run to know who its customers are, watch their transactions and report suspicious ones. Binance reached its own plea agreement the same day, part of a settlement in which it agreed to pay $4.3 billion, and Zhao stepped down as chief executive. In December 2023 a court also ordered him to pay the CFTC a $150 million civil penalty.⁠^[4][5][7][8]

In his plea agreement Zhao admitted that he had “prioritized Binance’s growth, market share, and profits over compliance” with the law, telling employees it was “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” in what he called a “grey zone”. Among the facts he admitted: until about August 2021, anyone could open a Binance account with only an email address and a password and withdraw up to 2 bitcoins a day, and could take out more by opening more accounts. Binance also caused at least $890 million in transactions between American users and users it identified as Iranians, although US sanctions bar Americans from trading with people in Iran.⁠^[4]

Prosecutors calculated that federal sentencing guidelines pointed to 12 to 18 months in prison, but asked the judge for 36 months, “twice the high end”, arguing that the guidelines did not capture the scale of the offence. Among their examples, about $106 million in bitcoin had gone straight to Binance from Hydra, a Russian darknet market where criminals sold illegal goods and services. On 30 April 2024 Judge Richard A. Jones sentenced Zhao to four months in prison and a $50 million fine, which had already been paid. The judge said he was troubled by Zhao’s decision to ignore US banking requirements that would have slowed Binance’s growth, AP reported. “I failed here,” Zhao told the court. “I deeply regret my failure, and I am sorry.” Zhao was released from US custody in September 2024.⁠^[1][7][8][9]

Eight months later a third US case ended without a ruling. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had sued Binance and Zhao in June 2023, accusing them, as NPR put it, of misleading investors and operating an unregistered exchange; Binance contested the charges. On 29 May 2025 the SEC and the defendants agreed to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought again. The SEC said it had decided “as a policy matter” that dismissal was appropriate.⁠^[2][10]

The pardon

On 21 October 2025 President Donald Trump granted Zhao “a full and unconditional pardon” for the offence. Zhao had said earlier in the year that his lawyers had asked for one. The White House announced it two days later. Its press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the administration of Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, had pursued “an egregious oversentencing” and been “very hostile to the cryptocurrency industry”, and that Trump “wants to correct this overreach”, AP reported. Trump said he did not believe he had ever met Zhao. “A lot of people say that he wasn’t guilty of anything,” he said. “I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.” Zhao posted: “Deeply grateful for today’s pardon and to President Trump for upholding America’s commitment to fairness, innovation, and justice.”⁠^[1][11]

Critics linked the pardon to the Trump family’s crypto business. In March 2025 MGX, a state-owned investment firm in Abu Dhabi, had put $2 billion into Binance, paying in USD1, a stablecoinStablecoinA token designed to keep a steady value, usually one US dollar, which its issuer promises to buy back. It isn’t bitcoin, and it depends on that issuer. (a cryptocurrency tied to the US dollar) issued by World Liberty Financial, a company the president’s family founded. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, said Zhao had “spent months lobbying Trump and his family while funneling billions into Trump’s personal crypto company”, and that “the pardon was the payoff”.⁠^[1][8][12]

Others pointed to the kind of offence it was. Mark Bini, a former federal prosecutor who is now a defence lawyer handling crypto cases, told AP that Zhao had gone to prison for what “sounds like a regulatory offense, or at worst its kissing cousin”, so the pardon was “not very surprising”. AP also reported that Zhao was the first person ever sentenced to prison for that kind of breach of the Bank Secrecy Act.⁠^[1]

Zhao has denied any deal. “There’s no business relationships whatsoever,” he told CNBC in January 2026, speaking of himself and the Trump family. MGX had chosen to pay in USD1, he said: “My request to them was they pay us in crypto. I don’t want to deal with banks, really.” Of reports that his pardon was arranged, he said: “As far as I know, that does not exist at all.” He told CNBC he had not spoken to Trump directly, and World Liberty Financial said it “had zero role in the pardon process”. Zhao no longer runs Binance but remains a major shareholder.⁠^[8]